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Parents the biggest influence on the choice to pursue post-secondary education

Studies find students whose parents didn&rsquo;t go to college or university are far less likely to go themselves. The exception is children of new Canadians, who are far more likely to go.

"My parents certainly believed that getting a postsecondary degree was a way to a better life," says Katherine Hong, a student at the University of Toronto. Her parents, who came to Canada from China in 1987, weren't able to attend university.
(JAY BARRETT FOR THE TORONTO STAR)

By ALEX DERRYSPECIAL TO THE STAR

Tues., Feb. 28, 2012

A student debating whether to pursue post-secondary education can be influenced by several factors: the cost, the investment, the time – and, more surprisingly, their parents’ choices.

According to two recent studies conducted by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), children of parents who did not go to university or college are far less likely to enroll in post-secondary education than those who did. At the same time, children of immigrants are far more inclined than those with Canadian-born parents to attend a post-secondary institution, particularly university.

“It is a huge shift from two decades ago,” says Ross Finnie, an associate professor of graduate and postdoctoral studies at the University of Ottawa. “Once better data came along and allowed us to tease out the different effects of family income and parental education, the story changed.”

The factors, according to Finnie, have shifted from economic to cultural ones. Recent studies found that one year of parental education has a greater positive impact on the likelihood of a son or daughter attending a post-secondary institution than does an extra $50,000 in parental income.

Children whose parents attended university or college grow up in a cultural environment that expects post-secondary participation. “They hear the stories and their parents often talk in a way that almost assumes the child will go,” says Finnie, “or at least that it’s an option.”

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And while tuition costs may remain a barrier for some, student assistance programs can help to ease the financial burden on many low-income families. Still, only 50 per cent of full-time students from the lowest income groups applied to the Ontario Student Assistance Program in 2007-2008.

At the root of this reluctance to apply, according to Finnie, is the absence of solidly positive perceptions that children have when their parents have gone to college or university.

Neala Kelly's experience stands in contrast to that: while neither of her parents attended university, she decided to enroll because it seemed like the right choice for her, and was also a popular choice among her peers.

“I would say I was more likely to go [to university] because my parents didn’t go,” says Kelly, who graduated from Carleton University in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in criminology, despite the fact that “post-secondary [education] was never really discussed at home.”

While growing up in Ottawa in a low-income single-parent household, she decided that university was the best option for her financial future, and also because her classmates were all applying to university. “I went to a pretty rich high school where all the kids ended up in university, so that's why I thought I would go,” says Kelly.

For children of new Canadians, according to HEQCO, participation in post-secondary education is much higher because of the promise of social and economic mobility. "My parents certainly believed that getting a post-secondary degree was a way to a better life," says Katherine Hong, a fourth-year student of art history and visual studies at the University of Toronto.

Hong says her parents, who emigrated from China in 1987 and settled in Toronto 10 years later, were determined to do everything they could to give her the best education in the city. “Neither of them were able to attend university when they were 18 and there is still a lot of bitterness there,” says Hong.

Both Kelly and Hong agree that post-secondary education was a good investment for their futures, and has also become a standardized requirement for most entry-level jobs.

But both women also share the same opinion that the benefits of post-secondary education are entirely reliant on how students use it to their advantage.

“Too often people attend university in order to figure out what it is that they want to do with their lives,” says Hong. “Why not use a different means of figuring it out, and then go to university.”

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